Sunday Walk 66 – The Mythology of Deep Time

A few years ago I would likely be labeled a theistic evolutionist without realizing what that meant. I was reading Alvin Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies and studying his evolutionary argument against naturalism. I was also studying how William Lang Craig accepted the deep time of the Big Bang to try to make the kalam cosmological argument work for him.

To caricature my position I tolerated ideas of evolutionary and cosmological deep time as long as I could sugar-coat them with some kind of spirit “guiding” evolution or somehow squeeze in the kalam argument to assert the existence of that spirit. By accepting deep time I was, unwittingly, throwing original sin under the bus along with the rest of the Bible. And all for what? My goal was to assert the existence of some spirit without checking first just what that spirit was.

I now realize that whatever that spirit might be it could not be Yahweh as revealed in the Bible because I had replaced the historical chronology of Genesis with the pseudo-scientific mythology of deep time. Rejection of Genesis is a rejection of the entire Bible. Atheists understand this which is why they ridicule Creation, Noah and Babel. Compromising Christians do not. What I needed was an apologetics directed back at myself that would lead me to take the Bible seriously.

All of that changed when a fellow member of our Men’s Group briefly mentioned the rapid geological change that happened as a result of the eruption of Mount St Helens. Looking into this, I was shocked to realize that places like the Grand Canyon did not need millions of years of deep time to form. The catastrophic global flood and its aftermath could explain the present state of continents, oceans, mountains, coal deposits, canyons, fossil-filled sedimentation layers and glaciers.

Furthermore, if I started with God creating the universe in a functionally mature state, that is, if I took Genesis as seriously as I should have, I could get to the present state of the universe with only a few thousand years of change using processes identified and measured by modern operational science.

By contrast, if I started with the Big Bang and over 13 billion years of deep time, I could not get to the universe I see today. Too much entropy would have occurred over that span of time. Indeed, the evidence is so overwhelming against deep time that Don Batten could provide 101 separate lines of evidence suggesting that the earth and the universe could not be anywhere near as old as deep time mythologies claim it to be. I began to see that the hypothesis of deep time had been falsified over and over again.

The reason I mention all this is because experimental, operational science (not naturalistic speculations presented as “science”) has matured to a point that no one needs to shy away from the historical creation and fall accounts in Genesis.

Cal Smith, The Trojan Horse of Long Ages, Answers in Genesis Canada

Weekly Bible Reading:  Obadiah (Audio), Joel (Audio)
2 Kislev, 5782, Toldot: Parashat Genesis 25:19-28:9; Haftarat Malachi 1:1-2:7
Commentaries: 
David Pawson, Obadiah and Joel, Part 48, Part 49, Unlocking the Bible
Bible Project, Obadiah and Joel

Author: Frank Hubeny

I enjoy walking, poetry and short prose as well as taking pictures with my phone.

16 thoughts on “Sunday Walk 66 – The Mythology of Deep Time”

  3. So I was deeply troubled last night about the state of the universe…Well, that sounds strange right from the get-go. So I looked up some things such as “Why does the sun rotate?” The answer was the angular momentum of the gas that congealed to make the sun influenced it to rotate. (pictures some of the gas offering a bribe if it will start moving) “If all the gas and solid matter was revolving around the sun, how did it accrete? Wouldn’t some of it have to be traveling at a different speed?” If you put iron filings in a ring and place a magnet on the ring, the accretion doesn’t affect much in that ring unless you move the magnet. Explain Jupiter then. You’d have to assume that the gas and dust in the disk around the sun were not evenly distributed. That isn’t supported by the accretion model. “Why did the earth cool?” The outer mantle is at most 18 miles thick, and the core is still hot and rotating. How did it cool so much that the outer mantle is solid and not melted? Why is there ice? Why is there so much water? 70% of the landmass is covered with it! It is postulated that all of it came from water-bearing meteors and comets. Remember that the gas/dust disk that rotates around the sun is all moving in the same direction. Why do some planets revolve faster than others? Why do some planets rotate and others do not? Why do some planets move at different speeds around the sun? If we’re all in the same disk, where did these water-filled meteors and comets come from?
    I have the feeling that scientists see “time” as static and unchanging, and God does not.

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  4. Frank,
    Retracing the steps to your current thinking is helpful to understanding how easily we can be misled by “accepted” science (as I once was) and how alert we must be to such deviations from God’s word.
    pax,
    dora

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  5. I don’t know if you’ve read this book already, or if it will be as thought-provoking for you as it has been for me, but Owen Barfield’s “Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry” is an incredible book on this subject. Also, his book “Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning” is as Howard Nemerov puts it “secret” and “sacred”. A must for poets and writers and readers of all genres.

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  6. If you haven’t already read it, I recommend Owen Barfield’s “Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry”. Another of his works, “Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning” is beneficial to anyone who writes or reads in any genre.

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    1. Thank you for the reference. I did try to read Barfield’s “Saving the Appearances” many years ago, but I did not understand it. It is available for rent on Internet Archive. I will see if I can understand it better today.

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  8. Seems knowing what is science (real science, operational science, etc) is so important at so many levels both spirtually but also with political discernment too these days as people say “follow the Science”…

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